Research in adults has shown that novel words are encoded rather swiftly but that their semantic integration occurs more slowly and that studying definitions presented in a written modality may benefit integration. It is unclear, however, how semantic integration proceeds in children, who (compared to adults) have more malleable brains and less…

Although the transparency of a writing system is hypothesized to systematically influence the cognitive skills associated with reading development, results of cross-language investigations are inconsistent and usually do not address this issue in a developmental context. We therefore investigated the cognitive dynamics of reading fluency of…